PROSOCIAL FAMILY FACTORS, CULTURE AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

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DESCRIPTION (Applicant's abstract): This career award supports the training of the candidate to become an outstanding independent investigator in the study of family factors, culture, and the course of schizophrenia. The specific aims of the three-year program are for the candidate to receive formal training in two area: anthropological methods and theory, and family interaction methods and theory. Dr. Arthur Kleinman at Harvard University and Dr. Robert Edgerton at UCLA will serve as the candidate's mentors for his anthropological training. Dr. Alan Bellack at the University of Maryland at Baltimore will serve as his primary mentor in the study of family interactions along with a distinguished team of other family researchers. The first two years of the award will include formal instruction through coursework and research seminars, as well as individual studies with the mentors and their colleagues. The third year of the training will be largely comprised of guided research supervision while the applicant carries out a pilot study (N=15) at a Los Angeles area mental health center. In addition to providing important training experience, the study will serve to meet the overall research objective of assessing family members' prosocial behaviors as they relate to the stable course of schizophrenia. Mexican origin families will serve as research participants because prior research indicates that their degree of warmth is related to a stable course. Culture-specific factors and family interaction styles will be assessed to examine the cultural basis of family relations, particularly prosocial family functioning. Identifying the role of prosocial family factors in patients' clinical course has important implications for family factors research and family treatments of schizophrenia.